Iran: US media has increasingly become a mouthpiece of the Bush administration, perpetuating and ventilating the fears ...

The Iran Fixation | How the American Media Enables Bush | By Ayesha Ijaz KhanY
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To the contrary, US media has increasingly become a mouthpiece of the Bush administration, perpetuating and ventilating the fears which prevent a population from thinking rationally about important issues. I happened to be in New York a few months ago when President Ahmedinijad arrived to address the United Nations General Assembly. The day he landed, local press ran shocking headlines in the newspapers. "Tehran Thug Comes To Town," read one; "Terror Has Landed," said another. It was the kind of diction one expects from a grade school bully, not intellectually honest analysis of issues with global ramifications.

Dismissing some of the local papers as tabloids, I picked up a copy of The New Yorker magazine, only to find on its cover a demeaning representation of President Ahmedinijad sitting on the toilet, pants down, playing footsie with the man in the next stall. Surely, for the American audience, it was a take on the Republican Senator from Idaho who had recently been caught doing just that with an undercover cop at an airport bathroom and a jibe simultaneously at Ahmedinijad, who had denied in his speech at Columbia University that homosexuality existed in Iran.

But to many American Muslims it was flagrant cultural insensitivity to caricaturize a head of state in such a way, and also a reminder that Iran was being demeaned through its President only so the attack could soon be justified. It reminded Muslims of the early nineties when Saddam toilet paper had taken America by storm, only to be followed by operation Desert Storm. That is how the propaganda machine works. First you degrade and then you attack. ...
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But what would have happened if the Iranians sat tight and did not offer their version? What will happen in months to come? Will the Bush administration continue to find excuses to throw America into another unjustifiable war? Will the American media just sit on the sidelines and watch while that happens? Is their obligation to the people of the United States or to the Bush administration?

Ayesha Ijaz Khan is a London-based lawyer and writer and can be contacted via her website www.ayeshaijazkhan.com